


in the house of the rising son

by kybercrvstals (m_iri)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Family Issues, Hux isn't completely human, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, drug misuse, essentially Hux doesn't follow his prescriptions
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-21
Updated: 2016-02-29
Packaged: 2018-05-15 09:25:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5780434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/m_iri/pseuds/kybercrvstals
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>( The pun in the title is intended, of course. )</p><p>General Hux's business with the First Order brings him back to his childhood home and a family and life he has done his best to leave behind. Kylo Ren's presence does not help in the least.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Hux receives an invitation and extends another.

His father wants him to come home.

The crowd of pills is sickly-colored, purple and blue like a day-old bruise on his cupped palm. Hux tips his hand and they shift position, brushing capsules like soldiers brushing shoulders in the _Finalizer_ ’s narrow halls. He thumbs at them. In the doorway, HD-7 trills once and falls silent.

His father wants him to come home.

Sucking in a breath between his teeth, the general curls the fingers of his free hand over the edge of the sink until the knuckles strain the confining skin. Pain sparks in his joints. _His father ordered him to come home_. He squeezes harder, squeezes until his hand shakes and the sparks flare, until his face is red and the panic starts to bleed out of him—

HD-7 trills. Hux straightens. In the mirror, a pale man with close-cropped hair releases the edge of the sink, shakes the ache from his hand, and brushes all but two pills back into their container. The pale man’s pale fingers snap the container’s lid shut. His pale throat stands out against his black collar and the green-grey blotches of a bruise just visible where the jacket’s first button has come undone.

“You have a visitor,” the room's computer purrs.

Hux lifts his eyes to the interface panel on the wall above the sink, tucking the container away, rolling the remaining pills between his fingers. “Identify.” He knocks his head back, scowls, swallows his meds without water.

“Visitor identified as Kylo Ren.”

Had he had a meeting with Ren today? Or had the Knight arrived on some whim or magical intuition? Panic gives way to irritation. No one has a talent for appearing when they are least wanted like Kylo Ren. No one, perhaps, save Brendol Hux. Every time his son had faltered, he was there, looming from an inch beneath his son’s jaw, never letting the slightest error escape his notice—

Hux blinks floating motes out of his eyes. He swallows, buttoning his undone collar. “Open door.”

Kylo Ren sweeps into his room like a Seneshan wind-storm, robes swirling about his feet like black dust kicked up by gales, writhing just above the ground. He stops just inside the door. “I was under the impression I had automatic access to your rooms.” The mask’s filter hides the smoothness of his speech, but it does not conceal the irritation in his words.

“No one has automatic access to my rooms.” Stepping out of the restroom area, Hux leaves the door open. He walks to his desk – not because he needs anything there, but because the path allows him to turn his face from Ren’s gaze without ducking his head. “Take off that mask.” Slipping into his chair, Hux opens the drawers of his desk too loudly. He almost does not hear the soft hiss that means the mask’s release catch has been triggered. Tension slips from the general’s shoulders, just enough to be visible, and he grabs his datapad and holoproj.

“—There’s something wrong. What is it?”

He taps the datapad hard enough his close-cropped nails click against the screen. “Keep out of my head, Ren.”

“It’s – loud. I can’t help but hear it.” A hesitation. A soft sound, perhaps from Ren licking his lips. “I was halfway across the ship, Hux."

"Allow me to congratulate you on your powers of hallucination. Snoke will be so pleased to know you've started hearing things that aren't there."

Ren's unfiltered voice is low and smooth, gathering the gravel that will soon turn his tone to a snarl. "Do not mock the Supreme Leader."

"I'm not mocking Snoke," Hux says with a cheer he does not feel, "I'm mocking you." He sits a little straighter in his seat, waiting to be grabbed, dragged around, insulted, slapped. He's eager for it, even. That comes as a surprise. Pain is cleaner than fear and easier than hate to swallow and dissolve, but baiting Ren usually has another goal – one involving the nearest wall and lips on teeth on tongue.

"What’s wrong?”

The question is soft. It is not what he wants. Curling his fingers and his lip, the general tenses.

In his head, Hux rises from his chair, rounds on the bare-faced boy behind him, orders him from the room. In his head, Ren drops his eyes and clenches his jaw. The mask sinks onto his shoulders and he turns on his heel, heavy steps echoing down the hall, muffled by the hiss of the door as it slides shut. In his head, Hux rejects this gentleness. Ren has lately extended a kind of careful fondness towards him, and he – he had permitted it. But he sees Ren now with his father’s eyes: the Knight is a liability. Hux needs no hands to hold. He needs no help.

“General.”

Hux stiffens, hating him. “What?”

“—Very well. I’ll go.”

“Wait.” A few quick swipes of Hux’s fingers over the holoproj send a message skittering into the air just at eye level, unfolding itself into a tremulous blue projection of an aging man, all skin and bones and battle scars. For a moment, there is silence. Ren does not move. Brendol Hux’s stare cuts through the processed air, flinty eyes gazing out from both the projection and the framed portrait above the general’s desk. The younger Hux sinks back in his chair, imagining his father’s respect for him dripping from his cupped hands, draining.

He could always kill the projection now.

But a soft click of metal behind him informs him Ren has set his mask – which he had removed without a word at Hux's demand – on the coffee table by the door, and he realizes that choice has already been made.

With a gesture from Hux, the message begins.

“ _Starkiller Base will soon be completed,”_ says a hollow voice. Brendol Hux's features move very little as he speaks. _“But I am informed by your quartermaster that Kyber crystals are necessary in the later stages of construction, and that you are making contact with planets in the Unknown Region that produce them. And that you will oversee their acquisition yourself.”_

Ren’s consciousness curls at the back of Hux’s skull, settling there like some old, familiar weight. “Stay out of my head,” he protests, and finds his voice is little more than a murmur.

 _“—request that Senesha’s quarries be the ones to provide the crystals, and that, while here, you take the opportunity to visit the home you appear to have forgotten.”_ This, Hux – and Kylo Ren, too, by proxy – realizes for the second time today, is not an invitation. It is an order.

Brendol Hux’s gaze shifts. It falls, seeming to find his son’s sternum even where Hux sits, half a galaxy away. Pale eyebrows twitch inwards on Brendol’s face; they give the flickering blue face an aura like a storm about to break. _“You will make time for this visit, Alcordeus.”_ The message ends. The image folds itself away.

Lazily, Ren uncurls himself from around the back of Hux’s mind. On Senesha, a younger Hux had owned a moraine that would lift itself with utmost care from the chest of a sleeping Brendol Hux, each toe curling as it stepped daintily away in search of some new warmth to lie in. There is something of the moraine in Ren now: a slow care disguised as indifference as he extracts himself from the general’s thoughts. Yet despite having felt all that Hux felt while the message replayed, despite knowing what the general will say, when Ren opens his mouth, all that escapes is: “You’re under no obligation to go.”

Hux snorts.

“He does not outrank you.” Stepping closer, Kylo draws the nail of one gloved thumb down the general’s uniform, tracing his spine with practiced ease. “He does not command you.”

“He’s my father.”

Behind him, the Knight pauses, licks his lips. “I see no importance in that.”

“—You’re right.” Hux feels as though the thin air of the _Finalizer_ is not enough to fill his lungs. “It isn’t his choice. It’s mine. And I’m going.”

Ren’s gloved hand falls from his back.

“I want you to come with me,” Hux adds.

What escapes Ren is not quite a laugh – there is too much air in it, too much force. Hux spins his chair around and catches a fading smirk on the Knight’s full lips. “No,” Ren says, and Hux kisses him at that, dragging him down to meet teeth with teeth and tongue with tongue until he has burned away all Ren’s desire to dare to tell him _no_ again.

 

\------

 

Hours later - it is not minutes, certainly - they lay together in the haze their hot breath has made. Hux's arm remains thrown up over his face, a flush slowly seeping from his cheeks. 

Black brushes blue brushes white as Ren’s still-gloved hand traces the bruise he painted across Hux’s collar the week before. Then, it had been Hux who melted for him beneath the pain; today, it is the Knight who is red-striped, relishing the sting of the general’s crop. “Strange,” he murmurs. “You allow me to hurt you, but not help you.”

“I could say the same of you.” Hux’s lips twitch as Ren’s thumb digs into the mark. He blinks, hard, and drops his arm. He is still dizzy with the high of it – the power – the _control_ – but the thought of Senesha is a weight around his ankles. It will drag him down soon enough.

“We’re not discussing me.”

“Maybe we should be.”

“Not tonight. There’s so much you don’t let anyone know. Like this—“ Ren draws his fingers lower, over the patches of tiny iridescent scales that climb Hux’s ribs like ivy. Curiosity circles at the back of Hux’s mind, a question the Knight need only think, not speak.

On reflex, Hux says, “It’s a skin condition. Not important.”

“Hm.” Ren pushes himself upright, dragging thin fingers through his dark curls.

A light throbs overhead. The general lets his eyes rise to it, wondering why it flickered. Snoke’s apprentice had shattered bulbs before without knowing it, annoyance or anger or agitation making the very air around Ren shiver. On the other hand, perhaps Hux was going insane. Or experiencing side effects. Two pills of arenoxitol was twice the dosage. “It is,” he insists, belatedly.

The Knight turns dark eyes on him. No doubt the look is meant to cow him, but a red mark left by the crop on the side of Ren’s throat has faded to fuschia-pink, like lipstick stains, and Hux only snorts. This is childish, all of it: Ren, their liaison, the marks like makeup smears that Hux had left. “You know I can take whatever I want.”

Hux decides he has a headache. “Do you just compose witty phrases in your head and repeat them ad nauseam?” Above them, the light flickers.

“It’s true.”

“You will not,” Hux says, pronouncing the words with a crispness that would have satisfied even his etiquette instructors from the Academy, “use your powers on me.”

With a growl, the Knight shoves himself from the bed. He stamps his way into the bathroom, stripping off his gloves as he goes. Hux hears the shower begin to hiss. Emptiness overtakes the room. Experimentally, the general shifts towards the warm place Ren left behind only to find the eyes of his father’s portrait upon him from the wall of the next room.

Fire stabs through his veins. He makes an obscene gesture at the painting, winces, and at once feels cold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On tumblr at http://coracles.tumblr.com/post/137798574006/in-the-house-of-the-rising-son . Reblogs / likes appreciated, as are kudos and comments, of course!


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Hux addresses his father and avoids a friend. Though in the opposite order.

At 19h00 daily, Captain Phasma makes an attempt on General Hux’s life. “You’ll kill me with this,” he informs her as he arrives. It is 18h45, and he is already dressed out for exercise, charcoal uniform traded for a tight-fitting black top and loose-legged trousers.

“Don’t be dramatic, sir,” she says. She, too, arrives in advance, inspecting every inch of the gym before the training session. Nightly, she makes her rounds before the others arrive. Nightly, Hux paces the length of the room. They share these few minutes, alone with the hum of the overheads. When they are done, they begin to warm up their bodies for the workout to come, and by the time the other officers trickle in, Hux sits, stretching, beside Phasma on a bench, letting her broad hands push him into a bend that makes his still-sore muscles scream.

It’s a strange thing, to have a friend.

Phasma paces before the mirrored wall once all are present. Stripped of her chromium armor, she seems taller still, and her close-cropped hair shifts with each barked instruction. “Come on,” she says. “Front-leaning rest position.”

Hux fights the urge to groan. Something must escape him despite the effort: the officer beside him lets out a breathy laugh, and the corner of Phasma’s mouth twists up. “In cadence,” she says. She drops to join her companions on the floor. “Exercise!”

Twelve Stormtrooper officers and one general sink towards the gym’s padded mats, then rise again. Eyes on the mirror before them, Hux watches the swell and fall of bodies as they suffer through the day’s pushup quota. Each back and strong shoulders seems an outline of a wave, the dark waters of Senesha’s seas in human form, a late-night tide coming into shore. Something twinges deep in his shoulder. Phasma calls out the count as they work, voice steady above the sound of breaking waves.

He forces his muscles into obedience. Hands braced against the mats, Hux feels a bead of sweat roll down his nose in crisp, clean clarity. It drops, a moment later. Strikes the mat. Splits on contact, leaving three, _four_ damp marks there.

Phasma’s voice is not Phasma’s anymore. The iron tones of the old drill sergeants from Stomtrooper basic training have wrapped itself around her voice. Hux wants to stop; his arms ache; he does not stop. Sweat sticks his dark shirt to his skin.

“General.”

Hux freezes at full extension, arms shaking.

“Sir.” It is a trooper’s voice. They have a particular accent, a product of the program. Brendol Hux had decided that – had talked at length about how he stripped identifiers from his soldiers, one by one, until they belong nowhere in the galaxy except in their armor and barracks – had received a medal for it. Several medals. Hux supposes he earned them. He had crafted and controlled generations from birth: troopers, officers, his daughter, his son. A laudable accomplishment. Awe-inspiring and awful, as such things are.

“Sir, we’re moving to the benches.”

He blinks, head buzzing, bringing himself back to the present. “Of course.” Dropping to his knees, Hux sits back on his heels, pushing the hair from his eyes. “I’ll be right there. Thank you—“ He peers upwards. “—Boiler.”

JJR-304 remains expressionless. The trooper ducks his head, an informal salute, and steps away.

Hux drops hard onto the mat and finds it slick with his own sweat. Hair prickles on the back of his neck, and he raises his head to catch Phasma’s stare. Curling his lip, he stands and follows JJR-304 to the weights and benches in the center of the room. The clock reads 19h20.

At 20h30, eleven Stormtrooper officers file into the refresher, shedding black workout clothes before the doors are closed. Hux darts in ahead of them, trading the privacy of a later shower for an escape from Phasma’s eyes. No one stares in the refreshers. No one asks unwelcome personal questions about fathers and visits and distracted minds. A few of the troopers joke, and otherwise, there is quiet.

The officers dress with the same brisk efficiency with which they wash, not caring if they are seen. When individuality does not exist, embarrassment does not, either. Hux always uses a stall in the non-co officers’ recreation rooms, but here, among conditioned men, he falls easily into their routine. It is reminiscent of the Academy. Of another time and another life when he was not Alcordeus, not Hux, but Sparks, a junior officer in a trooper unit. When he is finished, he slips out of the room.

She will come to find him later, on the command deck, he is sure. But as long as he does not have to meet her grey eyes now, he does not care.

 

 

 ----------------

 

 

“I accept the invitation with pleasure, sir. I have sent you the dates and details of my arrival on Senesha, for your approval.”

His father’s head and torso hang midair. A table’s edge cuts the image off, and Hux finds his mind’s eye tracing the remaining sides of the massive oaken slab that had served as Commandant Hux’s desk and command chair since time immemorial. “Good,” the commandant says. For a moment, he lifts his eyes from the datapad just out of sight to the face of his son. “These are adequate. We’ll be expecting you.” He drops his gaze again.

Silence stretches between them, a dark cloud of things unspoken. In his quarters, solar systems away, the younger Hux fights to stand still.

“Thinking about fidgeting is as bad as doing it, boy.” The elder Hux does not lift his eyes from his screen.

Hux’s desire to turn on his heel and pace triples. “Yes, sir.” His fingertips dig into his palms.

“Your discipline has become lax without a superior or peers to correct you.”

“Yes, sir.” If he could stop the shame that rises in him, he would. If he could stand here beneath his father’s gaze and say anything, _anything_ , besides ‘yes’ and ‘sir’, he would. But Ren’s magic powers, were he to use them on the general now, would tell him dangerous things about Hux’s heart and mind. Even seated at the head of a government spanning the known galaxy, with no one to answer to save his own quiet conscience, he would still hang onto Brendol Hux’s words like the child he had been.

He feels sick, or desperate, or disgusted. Or somewhere in between. “Sir,” he says as the silence begins to stretch on once again with no dismissal forthcoming, “may I ask—“

“Yes?”

Behind his back, Hux’s fingers curl into pale-knuckled fists. “Your first invitation, as well as your tone today, gives me the impression that I have somehow erred or angered you.” Leather creaks as he squeezes his gloved hands tighter; he wonders if the microphones will catch the sound. “I hope that is not the case.”

“You’ve neglected to contact your family regularly, even at broad intervals.” Leaning forward, Brendol raises a brow. “That constitutes a failure on your part, does it not?”

“I’m bloody _busy_.”

His father’s eyes flash. “Try that again.”

Hux takes a breath. He holds it between his teeth, waiting for patience, waiting for calm. “As commanding officer of both the _Finalizer_ and Starkiller Base,” he says, letting the air escape, “I am required to supervise the actions of nearly one hundred thousand men. My leisure time is, regrettably, limited.”

“Better. But still unacceptable.” His father raises his eyebrows. “You will do better in the future.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is there anything else, then?”

“No, sir.”

“Then—“

Hux’s breath catches in his throat. “Actually—“ His pulse flutters as his father sets his datapad down upon his desk, leaning forward. “I wish to invite another. To accompany me on my visit.” He closes his eyes, cursing himself, cursing his father, cursing Snoke and the Knight and the night outside, too, for good measure. “His name is Kylo Ren. He is the favored apprentice of Supreme Leader Snoke.”

“Why?”

“Lord Ren’s status and proximity to the Supreme Leader makes him an ideal connection to cultivate. He—“

“Why are you asking me if you can bring this man into our home, son? What is your interest in him?”

Alcordeus Brendol Hux feels abruptly very, very young. Then he feels hot, as though a riptide current dragged him deep into Senesha’s warm seas. A pink flush claws its way over his skin.

“Answer me, boy.”

Hux imagines that this is what it must feel like when a vessel’s grav generators fail. Computer systems ship-wide blast their warning sirens, and the world lurches skywards. Everything hangs, suspended. Hux can feel it, though his feet remain planted on the floor: his stomach coils, his heart rises in his throat, his head fills with static and a rushing of blood.

For a moment, he is aware of nothing but bone-deep silence and his father’s eyes. When he speaks, his voice is not his own.

 

 

 ----------------

 

 

At his table in the officers’ mess, the general sits alone.

He _enjoys_ the kitchen staff’s rendition of kototh, he muses. They stew the roots in the same cheap spices that had been common on Senesha during his Academy days, and the taste has him drifting once again back through time to that planet, the rain, the grime of it. The seas, rising, falling. The academy’s grey walls. The kototh on his tray is nothing like the dish should be, nothing like how it is served in its original form on Coruscant, but it is exactly like home.

Snorting, Hux pokes at the stew. One ghost draws another, and another, and another, it seems. He had almost escaped Senesha here; it had taken only his father’s call to bring the past crashing back onto him again.

A murmur towards the front of the room draws his attention. Lifting his eyes, Hux sees a familiar black figure sweep in, and sighs. He drops his spoon. Folds his arms.

Officers lean away from Ren as the knight passes, guarding their plates and bowls with arms and shoulders turned carefully to shield them from the black-clad man. Ren pays no attention to them, however. He moves directly to where Hux sits, alone. “General,” he says. He sways slightly where he stands. “I accept.”

“Pardon?” Hux says, tapping his fingers against his elbows.

Ren’s tone is humorless, even through the voice modulator; he is unnervingly serious. “Your invitation,” he clarifies. “I accept.”

Hux stiffens.

The Knight tips his head. There is a curious brush of warmth and pressure over Hux’s brow: Ren is slipping into his thoughts. Hux immediately slams a wall between the Knight and his memories and emotions, and though he is untrained, he sees Ren rock back onto his heels. The pressure relents.

“That _invitation_ ,” Hux says, over-enunciating, “is hereby rescinded.”

“I – don’t understand.”

“You aren’t coming with me.”

Shifting, the Knight’s helmet cocks to one side. “Why?”

“Leave, Ren.” Unfolding his arms, Hux presses his gloved fingers to the tabletop, eyes fixed on the slit in Kylo’s mask.

“ _Why_?”

“Get out. Go meditate somewhere you won’t put my officers off their meals.”

For a moment, Ren’s frame tenses, as though ready to fight. Hux decides that’s fine. Every officer here will testify, if needed, that it was Snoke’s pet hound that assaulted their general without provocation. Then, fingers curled into fists, Ren turns on his heels and leaves.

A palpable amount of tension leaves the mess hall as the door slides shut behind him. Gradually, officers resume their conversations, leaving their general in silence, alone again.

Hux stares at his plate. He picks up his knife. Sets it down. Decides that, while stabbing the day’s unidentifiable meat with a knife while imagining a certain Knight is childish and unacceptable, _imagining_ doing so is not. He settles for that instead.


End file.
